Day 49 - 24/1/14 – Port Elliot – Newland Head Conservation Park SA

The idea was to be up nice and early to get into Horseshoe bay for a swim....but as I lay there in the salubrious surroundings of the show grounds I sensed that the clouds were out and the wind was blowing, so I rolled over and went back to sleep!

A while later we managed to get to the beach for a short swim out to the jetty. We were looking forward to diving of it as it was pretty high but as it was low tide it was declared unsafe and after watching a couple boys fishing for bait fish using Gents (aka live maggots) we headed for Victor Harbour.

The Tour Down Under was finishing in town around 3ish so we thought we would get in their early to have a look around. What we didn’t realise was that Michael Arvanitagis and 6,500 of his lyrca wearing mates were riding in front of them which bought the whole town to a complete stand still. It took about 45 minutes to drive about a kilometre to the other side of town, the problem being I couldn’t just pull over or find a park as I had a 18’ van attached to the back of the truck!

We found a place to park the IzzyGator and wondered down to where the race finish was. As you do at these events we wondered around for about 2 hours looking and being entertained and then found a nice little nook about 75m from the finish line and waited for an hour and a half for them to pass us. While the build up was great and the whole thing was very exciting I can’t say that it will go down on my list of memorable sporting moments, seeing 20 people flash past you at 70+km/hr and.....well that was pretty much it. We saw that some bloke in a team that wears white was at the front and...hmmm....we walked back to the van. Sorry to all the cycling supporters out there, but I suspect TV might be a better way to watch it.

We after all the excitement we headed off to Newland Head Conservation Park to set up camp. 

Throughout the previous afternoon and today we had been ‘purging’ our cockles, which while it may sound very exciting, is trying to get the sand out of your pipis so you can eat them.  In the end they were served in a burnt butter sauce with garlic and white wine, and truthfully they were pretty nice!

We discussed with the boys as they went to bed that tomorrow was fifty days on the road and Sam replied “I’m really looking forward to cracking the half century tomorrow!”

 We were also quite excited Warnie and Nia were coming for a sleep over, all the way from Brisbane, for the next two nights! Yeaaah!